Biotech Notes #6: the mind, marketing, design

Thoughts and feelings

Architecture of the ideal mind

Most discrimination I know is against a biological trait that differs from the mean. Discrimination against higher melanin content in the skin or lower in the hair, against lower testosterone levels, against the production of a dysfunctional protein, against the aging phenotype, against higher adipose contents.

Each epoch has also had its own ideal of a perfect human, dictated by the current people in power. From 18th century’s white and well-fed kings, to today’s muscular and stylish billionaires.

Now that biotech is empowering us with the proteins of that young and lean body, I’ve developed an interest in the architecture of the ideal mind — What personality and behavioral patterns have we historically discriminated against? What do today’s dominant minds wish to select for?

I started thinking about this because, in my experience, obesity has never been a malady of the body but a result of something else happening in the mind, like depression, anxiety, loneliness or boredom. Those, which have become buzzwords, and some claim to be the future’s most pressing problems, are problems of the mind. Yet today we still discriminate against the result. When we think of obese people, we imagine their fat body, not their aching… or shall I say “weak” mind?

The patterns of mind that we value and censor are perfectly present. Behind the muscular human I see a mind that trades intrinsic hedonism for extrinsic validation of a defined physical aesthetic. Behind the feminine gay man, I see a mind that expresses its sexuality freely. Behind the trillion-dollar CEO, I see a testosterone-full and dominion-seeking mind. And still we don’t know how much of these patterns is rational, reptilian, or Darwinian.

I don’t understand the difference between feelings and thoughts. Ironically, when asking ChatGPT about this, the answer might be interpreted as thoughts having a language to them that feelings lack. Since we cannot deny that the mind comprises both, are we to discriminate against feelings or how “we react” to them? That question probably pertains to the larger realm of “the self”.

In a world of intellectuals and athletes, emotional “control” (if we can call that EQ) might be a zero-multiplier as much as an opportunity equalizer. Elon’s rockets may drive us to Mars but his tweets might break the world apart. The amount of pleasure or pain any given human might experience is roughly the same, regardless of all other circumstances.

Most people think that GATTACA is a movie about a genetic engineering world. I see it rather as a movie about a mind’s reaction to a genetically engineered society. Vincent’s superpower is not in the blood he uses or how he transformed his body, but in his mind.

Today, I can biohack the fat in my belly and the tone of my skin to fit in. Tomorrow, would I take a cortisol reduction pill to calm my anger? What about some dopamine-regulating drug to be less delusional and more realistic? More testosterone to be more logical and less risk averse?

The question of agency over the mind is not new. We see it in regulations around conditions like schizophrenia — Should these people be medicated against their will, to bring their dopamine circuitry “back to how it used to be”? Many of them used to be smart and high achievers. Antipsychotics scare hallucinations away but the mind doesn’t seem to come back.

I’ve wandered far into the woods of a forest that is just beginning to grow. In summary, I think we could start to directly select for and against certain ways of thinking and feeling as we understand more about our biology, especially as it relates to the mind. I think and feel that this mind revolution could be one of the most beautiful of them all, but I don’t know yet what that means.

Marketing

Although my college degree reads “biotechnology engineering” which includes some introductory chemical engineering courses, today I see engineering as the last thing I’d like to do as a job. When I tell them this, my college classmates look at me as though I was joking, crazy, or simply lost in life. Those who took the genetic engineering course with me have called that creative path a “waste of my intelligence”.

I think that’s interesting as it relates to the ideal of a mind. In my small college campus, it’s so clear how the chemical engineers think more highly of themselves and make fun of those studying food engineering, and even more fun of those studying the arts. They assign a higher degree of effort to disciplines like physics, chemistry, and math, and think that those can get them higher paying jobs more easily.

The latter claim is easier to debunk, for there are many ways of making money. The former, however, is more complex. Numerical rationality is ascribed a higher social value compared to creative thinking or the act of creation itself from an understanding of human behavior and feelings, no matter how much capital and power is amassed in those other disciplines.

From my point of view, how we value different traits depends on both who we are ourselves and the models of power we are exposed to. Someone may be born as more logical than creative thinkers, and if they know that most of the founders and CEOs of today’s most valuable companies are engineers, they might assign the highest value to those traits as well. Many people thinking that way reinforces that worldview.

Anyway, my dad thinks it would be good for my professional development to start working for someone else, whether that’s at a large corporation or at a small startup. Just to get experience and learn how other people get things done, and to acquire skills out that.

Though I used to systematically reject the idea of working for somebody else, I’ve slowly opened myself to the opportunity of being paid to learn. After looking at open roles on LinkedIn, I confirmed that only only those in marketing, sales and some kind of product development sound slightly appealing.

See, the problem is that I only like the kind of research that clearly conducts towards a product, and I’m not satisfied with that; I also want to write the copy, produce the ad, and choose the hex code for the color of the package; and then I can also turn into a freak of making, managing, and saving money — Does that sound like the entrepreneur mind pattern?

Well, my grandmother on my father’s side is what I call “a real” entrepreneur. She built a business out of the resources she had and has managed to grow its cashflow over the years, throughout the tough times. Since all I did throughout high school is read a lot of research papers and write words, she as my classmates thinks I’m either to become a researcher or a writer. Not a designer, not an entrepreneur, not a marketing director.

Ironically, I think that the single reason why my writing has been successful is because I can make you want to click something by writing attractive copy, creating out-of-the-box banners, or daring to speaking about biotech confidently and romantically — Like if you’re a biotech company and come to me for marketing, it’s to win. We can only win if we’re the best. So we’re the best, and that’s what your customers should know. Period.

But what is marketing anyways?

Simple — It’s all just sex.

Let me explain.

The way I’ve heard most people talk about marketing is incredibly narrow, even compared to the first formal introduction I got to the subject. While most people think only of branding and promotion when they think of marketing, my International Baccalaureate High Level course in Business Management taught me that there are up to 7 Ps to marketing: people, place, product, promotion, price, process, and physical evidence.

Marketing is about the design of the product, its value proposition and how it’s imputed, the process through which it is made, the people involved in that process and in the sale, the channels through which the product arrives to the customers… Wow. That’s a deal more than just a commercial, nice colors or copy, huh?

During her interview on the Grow Everything podcast, I think that Christina Agapakis emphasized the importance of place and product. There’s an irony in non-scientists being scared of scientists because scientists are scared of non-scientists. The DNA that I’ve read in most scientists expresses fear of making “bold claims” and often fear of being too transparent too. I don’t think anyone would want a life partner with those characteristics.

Christina repeatedly mentioned throughout the episode that marketing is not downstream but upstream of product development. To me it makes sense. The 7 Ps tell you that marketing is not only about speaking for your product but about listening to your potential customers and designing a product that solves their needs within the boundaries of the economic and political environment.

As I’ve mentioned before, nobody cares about GMOs — Does it solve my problem? Does it collide with my current interests? Does it fit my budget? Does it make me feel like a better person? Cool, then the hell with GMOs.

I, Sofia, think that the marketer’s job is to understand people’s feelings, in order to make them feel in a certain way, through the products, through the ads, through the colors and the price tags.

As far as feelings go, my reductionist mind brings me back to the selfish gene. We all just want to survive and reproduce. Whatever signals fitness is truly in the reproduction business. Perfumes, social media, cars, elite higher education, fashion, bars… it’s all just sex! Or survival: medicines, food, freight, politics, construction, insurance…

Maybe that’s just one current of marketing though.

Design

Well, well, where have our biotech adventures led us to! In my quest for the meaning of biodesign, I’ve made a couple of conclusions: a) “bio”design as we know it today is fake and invalid because it contradicts a key principle of design itself: choice; b) design is harder than engineering, at least for me at this moment.

The way I see biodesign today is as “how do we solve problems with biology?” — I think that’s wrong. The world doesn’t need to solve problems with biology. The world needs to solve problems. If the solutions happen to be biological, the role of the biodesigner would be the figure out how to optimize that product so that it solves that problem even better than it currently does.

It is the job of the designer to clearly define the problem in question, understand its root cause, and search for the solution that matches that specific part of it. We cannot hope to have a single “cure for cancer” because that problem itself is too broad. Even when narrowing it down to something like pediatric early stage acute lymphoblastic leukemia, we’re looking at multiple factors.

If I’m getting it right, this is also something Christina talked about in the episode — It’s cool to come up with different solutions like biofuels or social media campaigns against fast fashion, but if we don’t understand the root of the problem and the macro forces at hand, we can’t hope to truly solve it. For some people that may be fine; but others do want to actually solve things.

In practice, I had been redirecting my cotton project towards producing functional cotton fibers: cotton that grows with antioxidants that the plant already produces naturally! When my mentor told me this was possible and I imagined the experiences I could create through that, I fell in love with the idea.

Then I embarked on this little biodesign journey and realized that, whatever my product ended up being, I wanted to show the world what great biodesign would be. So I questioned: why grow the cotton with antioxidants when you could just add them through a coating downstream?

And I remembered that I was chatting with one of the founders of Modern Meadow, Andras Forgacs, at Synbiobeta in 2022 and he told me how companies didn’t want cotton that grows with colors but didn’t explain why. It was only until I asked myself what it would take to sell this cotton or turn it into a product that I understood.

I needed to re-analyze the supply chains and understand my core business: I currently have a tissue culture platform. If I want to grow whole plants, I need to have land or sell these plantlets to cotton producers who need to get rid of cotton impurities like seeds, then take it to the mill, then to a textiles factory which follows the design of a brand that finally sells to consumers either directly or through retailers.

Interestingly, part of the reason why the cotton garments value chain is so long has to do with biology. Unlike other fabrics like nylon which are chemically synthesized by humans and our machines, cotton grows in plants, and it grows having seeds and a little bit of leaves, and in a boll instead of yarns.

My initial idea was to grow cotton trichome cells (which are the fibers) in-vitro, from cotton “stem cells”. This has been used as a research technique since the 1970s but only a graduate student from the University of Texas ever thought about scaling that up. Then GALY did, and then I asked myself “why not?” too.

Because the fibers grow shorter in-vitro and fiber length is probably the most important feature of cotton. Because growth media and bioreactors are currently more expensive than fertilizers and land. Because scientists are more expensive than farmers. Because we don’t even understand enough about cotton to differentiate stem cells into fibers consistently and directly. Because fashion companies are moving away from cotton, into polyester and other synthetic fibers.

There are as many reasons to try to overcome these obstacles. Because few fibers resemble cotton’s absorbance capabilities, biocompatibility, and biodegradability. Because climate change and pests are impacting cotton production and companies still want to use some of it. Because the US has banned the import of Chinese cotton. Because lab-grown cotton is completely transparent and free of pollutants. Because plant tissue culture can be automated.

That doesn’t immediately make it the best solution to the problems described. DNA markers can be used to trace cotton across the supply chain. The plant can be engineered to bloom faster. Other cellulosic fibers with similar characteristics and other attributes can be lab-grown more easily. I even imagine what it would take to grow seedless cotton (just like seedless lime) to facilitate its processing.

Ah, I understood that nobody would want colored cotton or cotton that grows with antioxidants because there’s a big chasm between that and the Paris designer choosing what exact Hex color this season’s polo shirts should be. What if they change their minds? Can the bioengineering guarantee the same consistency that chemical dyes have? How accurately can you calculate supply and demand for a single or multiple companies? Maybe I just don’t understand.

The big chasm was also between my tissue cultures and my desire to build consumer brands, which I alluded to in the marketing section — Could I somehow resolve these two forces or would I have to make a choice between the two?

For that I learned about the story of some clothing brands that I see my peers and I wearing today. Lululemon stood out. Did you know they use silver-infused yarns to interact with bacteria’s cell walls, kill them, and prevent them from stinking your clothes? I didn’t but I found that very cool. More importantly, I learned that they partner with a yarns company that has been doing this since the 90s.

So my dreamy mind, ignorant of the business of fashion despite having met the founder of the magazine with that name himself, finally understood that we live in a world in which chefs don’t grow their own wheat and computer companies don’t make their own chips: consumer-philic = production-phobic = design-centered — It’s part of the macro forces Christina was talking about, I think.

Maybe it’s a bit how our bodies work too. Our pancreas, for instance, is made up of endocrine and exocrine cells. Even within the endocrine cells, there are about five types, each specializing in the production of a different type of protein, for a different function. They still all work together, like a clock, in what we call pancreas. And the pancreas is part of a system which is part of our body, and so on. We are interdependent. No one does everything on their own. Complete vertical integration is unheard of.

If I was to show the world what great biodesign could be, then, I needed to choose the need or problem that I wanted to address.